Meta Question

'Places I've Lived' in our profiles and the inability to add any sort of punctuation to specify unclear places?

Is there a reason? I don’t know what it is.. it kind of tweaks my OCD or something, but I want so much to say Lille, France or specify that the Lafayette in which I reside is in California, not Louisiana.

@gailcalled, your profile didn’t register the semicolons, and the periods are not treated as separators, so the state followed by a period is a unit with the city that follows.

I found the limitations in the profile data very irritating too. I supposed it was because they were to be treated as tags and therefore the punctuation has coding properties. At least we can use a reasonable amount of formatting in the bio portion.

@gailcalled, yes, but ‘MA. Larchmont’ is a unit, a single term. You can see this if you place your cursor over it and then look down at the bottom left of your screen to see what address it is reading. So the period is not acting as a separator. Instead it is internal punctuation in the middle of a single link. Maybe this isn’t bothering you, but I find it a bit vexing that there’s no way around it. This is one of the reasons why I gave up trying to put that information out there. Likewise in my list of “Hobbies & interests” I couldn’t punctuate anything the way I wanted to.

@Jeruba: Interesting, but less irksome to me than to you, apparently. Lots of family tsurris now. And usually I can figure out people’s hobbies and interests, etc., if I am interested enough to focus a little.

I truly enjoy your book lists and grades, however, and use them as my cheat-sheets.

Personally, I’d say the easiest thing is just to use only the city name (and drop the state) since technically right now locations correspond to topics used in matching. Nothing will ever get matched to you if you use “Boston, MA” but “Boston” will probably send you a few questions from time to time. Yes, we’ll probably make places I’ve lived a much nicer system later but for now you’ll just have to make do.

@timtrueman, that’s kind of what I thought and meant to suggest in my remark about tags. The thing is, the main use for us is probably a social one: to learn something about people we’re interested enough in to look at their profiles. In that case, we’d want to know whether Portland was in Oregon or in Maine.